this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
738 points (100.0% liked)

Canada

9130 readers
1567 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Related Communities

🍁 Meta

🗺️ Provinces / Territories

🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.

🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.

💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales

🗣️ Politics

🍁 Social / Culture

Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
738
For the sake of our democracy, American hedge funds should be banned from owning Canadian newspapers. (rabble.ca)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
49 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Canada’s largest newspaper chain, Postmedia, is owned by an American hedge fund headed up by a wealthy donor to Donald Trump.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

ive been saying this for years.

we need a bias label, and an ownership label, on the front of every newspaper and published story or "opinion piece article". we need to know who owns what, and where they come from, and why they own it in the first place, and what their ties are. not a nice little bow on the end that say "the author, larry smith owns a dog and a cat in new york and is married, the end" but completely leaves out the part where "larry smith" donated to the proud boy movement and has been known to spread misinformation.

disclaimers on things like cigarettes and alcohol make sense, so does this. if something can cause harm, we should know about it before we even get involved with it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think this is part of a larger issue, in which people, even a lot of journalists I know, see news media as this bastion of neutrality and facts. It's a noble goal, which I do think journalists should pursue, but in reality any news publication will have biases. Even just which news you decide to highlight can bring up bias, let alone the actual things you write about the news.

Things would be a lot better if every journalist, whether right-wing, left-wing, or centrist, were upfront about their views and how the environment they're in shapes them. Bias is unavoidable, but being upfront about your biases can at least properly frame your views.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Most people don't read the news at all, they certainly won't take the time to read a bio on every single article they're reading.

Really the problem is media literacy and everyone becoming so meta minded. If a politician says something, they said it, that's a fact. The constant need to tell people how they should think about everything is where things have gone wrong. What's the strategy behind the thing the politician said? What impact will this have on the voters? Blah blah blah.

Putting a meta layer on top of the news where people will analyze the bias of the person analyzing the strategy behind what a person said isn't getting us closer to the truth, it's building more layers of meta bullshit on top of the other meta bullshit.

Facts aren't biased. It's all the crap they package with the facts that has the bias.

Print the quote. Show the speech. Focus on the facts and let people think for themselves about their opinions on those facts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

At least the effort diminishes over time. There are a lot fewer mainstream journalists than articles.

I would like to see more non-profit effort into making this information plainer and more accessible, in a way that has wide reach yet doesn't depend on media cooperation. Heavily promoted robust (and free) browser extensions, for example, that can parse out publication and author and will automatically show terse bios, or autogenerate (or select from a comprehensive bio) author/publication background information relevant to the specific article. The signal-to-noise ratio has to be super high so a tiny amount of additional information is highly informative and also pervasive.

Tools like Ground News or the 3rd-party publication rating systems don't go nearly far enough and don't have enough reach nor reduce user effort enough.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Facts in and of themselves aren't biased. Bias is introduced when you consider which facts get broadcast, and which don't. The context in which facts are stated also adds bias. I think that bias is fundamentally inherent to humanity.

You're probably right about people ignoring bias markers, but I was thinking more "incorporating your bias consciously, rather than subconsciously, throughout the article" instead of a bio or blurb at the top.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

As soon as you tell someone that there is bias in an article they'll likely ignore any facts in that article.

Really a major issue we have today is people falling down conspiracy rabbit holes. Are the likes of Alex Jones going to be telling people their bias honestly? So if we have all of the responsible journalists telling people their bias while those that peddle conspiracy theories don't, doesn't that just make it easier for those that peddle conspiracies? "This article debunking what I'm saying has a liberal bias, of course liberals are going to claim that I'm lying!"